By
Noel Hefele
Piece description from the artist
Spring time is a fresh start of youthful rejuvenation, new every year. It is amazing when the trees blossom and do their "tree thing."
Prospect Park has been a constant source of inspiration for me. In this particular piece, I was aiming to paint something I felt was impossible to paint. The overlap and repetition of the blossoms almost defied strict representation. There is no way to paint every single blossom, every single leaf, every single branch. You have to find a way to paint the essence of a tree without painting everything. The second hardest aspect of this painting was matching the red / pink color of the flowers. I didn't expect to have trouble with that.
I included a runner, as this magnolia tree is along side the top of the largest hill along the running course in Prospect Park.
I didn't know it was a magnolia tree when I painted it. At the time I didn't know the difference between magnolia trees and cherry trees, so in a way I painted my way into knowing about them. Now I recognize that the blossoms appear earlier each year by a week or so. In 2017, the magnolias barely had a proper blossoming due to warm weather in the winter. Is it possible that a fully blossoming magnolia tree can become a rarity in the future? I hope that is not the case.
Noel Hefele is a talented landscape painter with a diverse background in the arts. Born and raised in Norwalk, Connecticut, he received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002 and later earned a MA in Arts and Ecology from a school in England. Throughout his career, Noel has had the opportunity to exhibit his work internationally and has pieces in numerous private collections. He has also served on the board of the non-profit community arts organization PLGarts in Brooklyn, New York and co-teaches a graduate course at Brooklyn College called Human Tracks in the Urban Landscape. In 2013 and 2014, Noel was the Artist in Residence at the Barbuda Archeological Research center in the Caribbean.
Currently, Noel resides and works in the Bronx, New York where he is in the process of exploring Van Cortlandt Park and creating a new body of work. As an artist, Noel believes in the power of art to help us move towards a more responsible and holistic understanding of the environment. He sees the landscape as an entangled field of relationships that includes humans, animals, plants, minerals, and more, and believes that by viewing the non-human world as more than just objects, we can take responsibility for our impact on the planet and recognize that we are not the sole subjects of the Earth's narrative. Through his art, Noel aims to collaborate with the landscape in order to produce effects in himself and others, aesthetically and emotionally reconfiguring the way we see the world.
For more information and to see more of Noel's work, visit www.facebook.com/NoelHefeleStudios.
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